Okay. This is freakin' brilliant. I've done documentaries in previous years using Electric Fish's QTVR Matte, but it's orphaned, it's OS9 and AE 5.5 or earlier and it was slow. I've just offered up a test to my client and although it needs a little tweaking, it's a far cry from working from a 200MB QTVR file on OS9. Thanks, Carl!

Excellent Tutorial Carl; not only did I try it with the images you provided but then tried it on several images I found for Toronto. I learned quickly not all images are created equally - some line up better than others.

For readers, there is also another tool you can use on the Windows platform that's free for converting to cubic, look for Pano2QTVR; it costs if you want to make movies but free to use if you just want to convert to movies; just google for it. Worked perfectly.

If I took multiple cubic panos at set distances, could a bigger world be created? Create a flythrough of a house? Or explore a city? Is that possible? Seems like you could just link the cube faces, or it could turn into something ridiculous and complicated..

Just wanted to add that if you need to generate cube faces and don't want to spend any money on it, you could easily do this in Hugin (an open source panoramic suite), by using the command line tool "nona" (which also comes with Hugin or can be built on its own), or with PTStitcher (part of the Panotools open source package).

As I follow along with the tutorial I run into one issue. Once I have my world created and the camera is inside the cube, as I rotate, my view doesn't rotate with me. It waits until I have unclicked the mouse and then rotates to that spot. Is there something that I need to turn on in order to get a real time view as I rotate around my world? I hope I'm explaining this well. Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks!

The images are in fact being scaled up far beyond 100%. But, they're also getting proportionally farther away from the camera. So, "to the camera", no pixelation is happening and everything renders perfectly.

Andrew Kramer has a fantastic tutorial that demonstrates a similar camera principle (scaling above 100% with no image degradation) in his 3D compositing tutorial here on the cow.

but if the cube faces are being scaled, that would mean the images are being scaled, too...and the images were brought in to a same-size comp, meaning they're being scaled above 100%. I realize this can't be, since a %1000 scale would destroy the image quality, but I'm can't seem to wrap my head around how its working.

Scaling up the world scaler null makes the cube larger. As it scales up, the cube faces move further away from the camera, making the corners of the cube appear flatter to your eye. Once the cube faces are far enough away, your eye can't tell the difference between being inside of a cube and being inside of a sphere and the trick works.

1000% was just an arbitrary number that seemed to work well at the time of the recording. Any "large" number will suffice.

Now I want to stitch my own equirectangular shot. Anyone know of any resources to stitch the photos? Or a how-to, tutorial, or anything? Google yields mostly images that are equirectangular, or how to use them in a similar way, but I haven't found anything about stitching your own.

Thanks for the comments. It is possible to do the equirectangular to cubic conversion in photoshop, but as far as I know you can't do it using the built in tools alone. Instead, you need to buy the $30 LensFix CI / Panotools plug-ins from Kekus Digital -There are probably other approaches out there, but I'm not aware of them at this time.

If you choose to pursue the Buy LensFix CI / Panotools plug-in route, here's a link to a very useful tutorial on the subject:

Two final thoughts: You may be able to find a script out there that does all the data entry for you, or you could record an action within photoshop to do the same thing. Personally, I think cubic converter is a slicker method for an 8 bit workflow, but you may have to get the plug-in if you find yourself in a 32 bit pipeline.

Hi, good tutorial. Especially being that its free. I never go into using pano pictures in AE but I always wanted to. I was wondering though. Could you use Ps CS2 or higher to do the cutting up of the pictures. Thanks for you help.

When a project requires a photo-realistic 3D world, After Effects isnt usually the first program that comes to mind. Typically a 3D modeling/animation program is necessary to create virtual 3D worlds, but in this article CreativeCOW contributing editor Bill O'Neil demonstrates creating a 3D world for a TV spot he was hired to direct and post for the Big Ten Basketball Conference.

Building a Cube World: Part 2Play VideoIn this video tutorial, Creative Cow leader Carl Larsen shows you how to build a title sequence within the 360 degree environment created in part one of this tutorial series.

Building a Cube World: Part 3Play VideoIn this tutorial, Creative Cow Contributing Editor Carl Larsen shows you how to track a lens flare onto the surface of a 360 degree camera-aware environment without the use of a third-party plug-in.

With Creative Cloud updates announced ahead of the 2015 NAB Show, Adobe brings new workflows and expanded collaboration to Pro Video apps, including a Character Animator, new color workspaces and editorial tools in Premiere Pro, and Adobe Anywhere for Teams.

Storage and data management company NetApp announced a set of tools to enhance cloud services, including a more efficient operating system with simple tools to manage data on Amazon Cloud web services.

Kyle Andal and Gerard Andal, lead compositors at Zero VFX, bring invisible post-production magic to several films - including 2014 Academy Award-winning "American Hustle," in which the team helped transform 2013 Boston to 1978 New York - and also several commercial shots with mocha Pro.

LightGrid Script and Demo Tutorial Part TWO with New FeaturePlay VideoLightGrid Script creator Brian Charles demonstrates his newly modified After Effects script for rigging lights in grids and circles. The modified script with the new feature, which adds the ability to enable individual light colors through a checkbox in the effect control panel, is available as a free download in the Project Files folder.